houston

I know a lot of you are eager to see the space shuttle Endeavour flyover, but it’s been canceled for another day due to weather. The challenge comes from a frontal system sweeping down over the southeastern United States, from Kennedy Space Center to points west. NASA says it will meet again on Tuesday at […]
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After the blistering temperatures during 2011, and the relatively mild summer of 2012, you’d never guess that Houston has had a warmer overall temperature this year. But through August, it has, says Charles Roeseler of the National Weather Service. The city’s average temperature through August is 74.3 degrees, which is 0.4 degrees higher than the […]
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The drought is officially over for much of Texas. You can drive all the way to Dallas. You can drive all the way to Austin. And you can drive all the way to San Antonio. For the state’s largest metro areas the drought has ended. See the latest report from the U.S. Drought Monitor: As […]
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The future of western spaceflight is up for grabs, and it’s essentially a no-win battle between the status quo (NASA) and commercial providers trying to wrest away the job of flying astronauts to orbit after half a century of space agency dominance. On one side there’s SpaceX and other companies seeking some government support to […]
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Aerospace executive Norm Augustine visited Houston last week to speak on campus. His visit coincided with the announcement of a Space Act Agreement between Rice and Johnson Space Center to increase collaboration between the two institutions. Prior to Augustine’s lecture I had a chance to sit down with the man who led a comprehensive, independent […]
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The following is a guest post by JohnD, a regular blog reader, who graciously agreed to perform a robust statistical analysis of this month’s average temperature, estimated to be 90.4 degrees. This would be Houston’s warmest month on record, and it’s not really close. I wanted to know how statistically significant the variation was, and […]
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7 p.m UPDATE: The depression has now become Tropical Storm Bret, the season’s second named storm. ORIGINAL ENTRY: The National Hurricane Center has designated a system off the east coast of Florida as the Atlantic hurricane season’s second tropical depression. It’s expected to become Tropical Storm Bret during the next day or so. Fortunately the […]
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Every decade the National Weather Service updates the “normals” it uses to define a station’s normal temperature, rainfall and so forth. Normals are based on three-decade averages. For the last decade the weather service has used 1971-to-2000 as its “normal” baseline, but beginning Aug. 1 the National Weather Service will switch to using normals calculated […]
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It’s been so hot … That June was the warmest on record in Houston. The month finished with an average temperature of 86.15 degrees, besting a mark set in 1906. The Junes of 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 all rank among the 10 warmest Junes on record. April, May and June of 2011 all rank […]
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I’ve been holding off saying too much about the region’s increasing rain chances next week, because I’d really hate to give people too much of a false sense of hope. With that being said, the greater Houston region has perhaps its best chance of sustained rainfall, beginning Tuesday, that it has had in months. It’s […]
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